Glenda Jackson

Actor, Politician, Waitress

RADA-trained Glenda Jackson was shaped by her work with the Royal Shakespeare Company which she joined in 1964 and specifically by director Peter Brook's experimental Theatre of Cruelty season that year and its Antoine ... Read more »

RADA-trained Glenda Jackson was shaped by her work with the Royal Shakespeare Company which she joined in 1964 and specifically by director Peter Brook's experimental Theatre of Cruelty season that year and its Antoine Artaud-influenced improvisational games. She won acclaim for her chilling performance as an asylum inmate portraying Danton's murderer Charlotte Corday in the 1965 London and New York productions of "Marat/Sade," staged by Brook. And although she made a brief screen appearance as an extra in "This Sporting Life" (1963), her first significant film work was reprising the role of Corday in Brook's 1967 screen version of "Marat/Sade," perhaps auguring the many neurotics she has so brilliantly portrayed on stage and film.

Roy Hodges

Husband

married in 1958 divorced in 1976 met while Jackson was performing with the Crewe repertory theater and he was stage manager c. 1957

Daniel Hodges

Son

born in 1969 father, Roy Hodges on February 21, 1992 lost his left eye when a broken beer glass was shoved in his face after he stood up for two black men who were being taunted by whites in a south London pub

Went two years with almost no acting work at all; worked as shop assistant, waitress, switchboard operator and as saleswoman at Woolworths

Family moved to her father's birthplace in Hoylake, England when she was a year old

Worked as a saleswoman at Boots' pharmacy in Nottingham before entering RADA

Jackson was named after the 1930s American film actress Glenda Farrell as well as her grandmother May.

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Jackson's former husband Roy Hodges was reputed to have said about her: "If she'd gone into politics she'd be prime minister; if she'd gone into crime she'd be Jack the Ripper."

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She received a honorary Doctor of Letters from Liverpool University in 1978.

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Jackson's longtime agent Peter Crouch said of her: "I never thought she was going to be the easiest actress to promote. She has an individual quality which I reckoned was not going to appeal to everybody. But there is an enormous sex appeal. Something exudes from her like it does from a very healthy animal. She hasn't a high opinion of her own physical attractions. She once told me, 'I don't know why I keep getting all these scripts with nude scenes. I've got varicose veins, piano legs and no tits.' But the camera falls in love with her. A lighting cameraman once told me it was because she had 'wonderful lighting about the eyes' by which it turned out that he meant she had high cheek bones. So forget the ski-run nose and the snaggle tooth; the eyes are the things that matter in films." – from David Nathan's 1984 biography Glenda Jackson

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She received the Women's Project's Exceptional Achievement Award in 1988.